On topics today

This article surveys the state of so-called topic theory today. It charts its development through two generations of topic theorists. The first is constructed around three influential texts: Leonard Ratners seminal book that established the discipline in its own right, Classic music: expression, form and style (1980); Wye Allanbrooks. Rhythmic gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (1983); and Kofi Agawus. Playing with signs: a semiotic interpretation of classical music (1991). The second comprises significant advances in topic theory essayed through two further pairs of texts: Robert Hattens Musical meaning in Beethoven: markedness, correlation, and interpretation (1994) and Interpreting musical gestures, topics, and tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (2004); and Raymond Monelles Linguistics and semiotics in music (1992) and The sense of music: semiotic essays (2000). Topic Theory's role as the soft hermeneutic sub-field of music semiotics (relative to the harder, formalist practices of Nattiezs neutral level analysis) is portrayed here as navigating a number of treacherous polemical paths. These wend their way between referential style (expression) and structural syntax (form); historical reconstruction and hermeneutic construction; and heightened sensitivity to social meanings and imposed acts of creative interpretation. This existence of topic theory in a continuous dialogue between structural formalism and the semantics of expressive discourse is held responsible for its marginal position both to the dominant strains of contemporary postmodern musicology and to the dying embers of formalist analysis. The failure of topic theory to strike a fashionable text-context balance thus highlights why musicology continues to view semiotics with scepticism. Ratner presents his thesaurus of style labelssomewhat dubiouslyas the historically authentic ready-to-hand materials (types and styles) of eighteenth-century expressive musical rhetoric. But it is Agawus combination of this universe of topics with a Schenker-influenced beginning-middle-end paradigm that establishes the hallmark of first generation topic theory on which the first half of this paper focuses. Agawus delicate equation between extroversive and introversive semiosis is essayed as a pivotal turning point in topic theorys ability to transcend the mere passive ascription of rhetorical labels. Out of this equation, expressive meanings can ariseas much from the non-congruence, as the congruence, of signs and structure. Hatten's critique of Agawu for neglecting the full interpretative consequences of his signifieds is the springboard for his more hermeneutically replete brand of topic theory and the emergence of the second generation topic theorists. Hattens use of troping (a kind of musical metaphor), is one of many interpretative tools that are responsible for broadening the arena of topic theorysome of his others being: expressive genres, emergent meanings and markedness theory. These are deployed across a variety of musical parameters as Hattens attention increasingly turns to the prototypicality of topics in their euphoric and dysphoric states. Hattens interpretative work is shown to transcend historical reconstruction to comprise creative interpretation built on a much broader definition of expressive gestures, of which topics are only a constituent part. The article concludes with Monelles expos of the dubious historical underpinnings of Ratners topic theory foundations. This does not render this vibrant branch of semiotics redundant but, on the contrary, charts its future direction as one calling out for far deeper historical investigation and cultural criticism. Monelles enlightening forays into the more replete expressive meanings of such topics as the horse and pianto make this point abundantly clear. The future of topics today, if not musicology in general, is one of cultural criticism

The Language of Hell

The essay focuses on the depiction of hell in Milton. The author argues that Milton's Hell possesses a style more evocative than any of the overtly sacred scenes in Milton's Heaven, which, despite their proliferation of holy objects and symbols, remain for most readers religiously sterile

The role of the artist's unconscious with regard to the creative processes in fine art

ThesisA great many individuals who have asked themselves the question, "What is the making, characteristic of the artist, which is not an illustration?" have found an answer in something like the following: "This nontechnical making is plainly not an accident making, for works of art could not be produced by accidenr' (Tomas, 1964:5). If it is not the artist's skill, proposes Collingwood (Tomas, 1964:5), then it cannot be his reason, will or consciousness and must be something else. In this regard, Collingwood makes the following proposal: "It must be either his body, in which case the production of a work of art is at bottom a physiological activity, or else it is something mental but unconscious, in which case the prodygtive force is the artist's U[?q_onsq_i_g_y_§._f!Jind" (Tomas, 1964:5). Although the creative process is not a form of condition or a sort of unconscious functioning, created artistic products have definite unconscious consequences and appeal. Rothenberg (1979:351) proposes that "work's of art ~r_esent and incorporate UflQOfJ._§CiQ_L/§_ material and they reson_~te with the u__nqpnsc_iof.!~ey_el of the vi~yver or augien_r;e". Paul Torrance defines creat!yjty as "a/most inUnite. It involves every sense-sight, smell, hearing, feeling, taste, and even perhaps the extrasensory. Much of it is UfJ_~lf!e!J! . _nonverbal, and unconsciqus" (Sternberg, 1988:43)

The Trinity Review, May 1954, A Celebration for Wallace Stevens

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The Italian neo-avant-garde: between the historical avant-garde and postmodernism

The present work posits the phenomenon of the Italian neo-avant-garde in the wider cultural dynamics of Modernism, Avant-garde Art and Post-modernism. It argues that the Italian neoavant-garde's understanding and expression of the social value of formalized language and literariness is to be closely related to Modernist and avant-garde cultural dynamics, and not to a post-modernist regime of cultural values.Chapter one presents the Italian neo-avant-garde as a phenomenon to be posited within the scenario of the changing role of the humanist intellectual in '50s and '60s Italy. Avant-garde art as a notion and tradition is tackled through Peter Burger and Pierre Bourdieu's theorizations that are consistently referred to, criticized and used, throughout the study.Chapter two focuses on the problems posed by Italian Futurism to any idealistic notion of avant-garde art as good political praxis. It also explores the rhetorical codifications of the avant-garde's self-mythologizing discursive practices through the analysis of the Futurists' use and appropriation of the genre of the manifesto. The relationship between theoretical discourse and the sense of an end, or epochal crisis, constituting the Futurist manifesto, is here envisaged as an aspect that is a precursor of the proliferation of theoretical discourse referred to as 'post-modernism'.Chapter three analyses the neo-avant-garde's corpus of theoretical writing and shows that, despite the fact that they did not write a manifesto proper, the rhetorical codifications of the avant-garde's self-mythologizing discourse are still present in their individually written texts. The chapter also focuses on the neo-avant-garde's reception of Futurism and on the similarities and differences between the two movements.Chapter four posits the Italian neo-avant-garde within the broader framework of the historical avant-garde while highlighting their use of and relationship with science and scientific discourse, especially in Umberto Eco's works. It also carries out a comparison between Eco's modernist understanding of 'form' and literariness and Leslie Fiedler's 'American Post-modernism'.Chapter five concludes the work with a lengthy analysis of the use of the montage in the poetical works of the Novissimi poets Edoardo Sanguineti, Elio Pagliarani, Nanni Balestrini, Alfredo Giuliani and Antonio Porta. Moreover, it carries out a critical comparison between the discursive, ideology-oriented and anti-hedonistic use of montaged linguistic material characterizing the Novissimi's experimentalism and the iconic use of language characterizing the multimediatic experiments of poesia totale, concrete poetry and technological poetry.The conclusion highlights the modalities, or in Pierre Bourdieu's terms, the distinction marks, by which the Italian neo-avant-garde challenge, appropriate, change and finally perform the practice of avant-garde art as truly innovative art